one of the questions not addressed in Retromania is the possibility of music that is innovative but is also repugnant, or silly.... there might be any number of paths "forward", in fact, but if most of them are intolerable in some way or other, perhaps regular folks can be forgiven for sticking with the dependably pleasurable, the time-tested and true

^^^^^^

that said, not sure about this Blake-Iver effort at all, in lots of ways it is astounding in a "Starsailor"-meets-Supercollider--meets-MusicFromBigPink kinda way... I suspect that it might grow on me, like moss or like the fungus a couple of trees down our street that looks like pizza made of dung and earwax...

Monday, August 29, 2011

No doubt the Weighty Theme laden Let England Shake is set to sweep the Mercury but from this year's nominees my pick would be this lot

Pound for pound Metronomy's The English Riviera beats PJ's effort for melodic invention (plus it's not encumbered by a strained Great War allegory presented as contemporary-political-comment)

I don't think I've ever had melody-induced insomnia before, but the other night I was kept awake for a couple of hours by the unstoppable rotation of "The Look" in my brain

Not the sound but the effect of the record reminds me of Vampire Weekend's debut: that combination of freshness and inexhaustibility... and that upside-of-atemporality quality of being vaguely-redolent-yet-always-elusive ... The English Riviera doesn't yield to analysis, breaking down into its constituents and sources... the official account--a South Coast 00s take on West Coast 70s--I cannot hear at all... certain curls of vocal and melody remind me more of ... Gary Numan after Telekon? Except not really.

Friday, August 26, 2011

there are a LOT of songs on the radio that are fun, super-exciting, mad catchy etc

but that equally are

* not breaking any new ground whatsoever

* don't have any content as such

* don't have any character as such either

(which has a lot to do with AutoTune turning everybody into OmniBotSinger ... case in point, Britney, where what's distinctive about her - the husky croak in her voice - is extinguished by the Antares-Adorno effect)(one reason Ke$ha stands out is that she's found a way to convey personality through/despite AutoTune)

an interesting state of affairs, especially for people whose job (or inclination) it is to write about pop... in the absence of anything much going on in those three categories (innovation / content - resonance / personality) what is there to say? the redescription of such pristinely functioning and anonymous pleasure-machinery seems superfluous... these songs explain themselves, they are purely sensation-al

A pleasant surprise anyway (always had a soft spot for “Rebel Yell”, “White Wedding” and “Eyes Without A Face”) and I was impressed that despite having lived in LA for X number of years and being your Archetypal Rockstar Rebel he did not appear to have a single tat. (Ink is verily a scourge in LA). Nice guy and cool also to effect a "Cyberpunk, meet Cyberpunk" introduction afterwards between Bruce and Bill (Sterling co-invented it, Bill did an album titled it)

Here is a bit of the panel where Will.he.is riffs on the Meaning of Punk from the p.o.v. of One Who Was There and then I riff on the Meaning of Punk from the p.o.v of One Who Wasn’t.

Carpenter was an interview for a video for the upcoming Sound and Vision festival (more on this below). It was filmed in the office at his production company HQ. In the conference room, I noticed a sign on the boss’s desk facing out to his employees and bearing the legend “No Whining”. There was a hint of that old-school director steeliness in his manner (I imagine interviewing Howard Hawks, or Russ Meyer, might have been similar). But overall a very pleasant, courteous fellow, Mr Carpenter.

The interview is going to be previewed in two parts on the web and then shown in full as part of the Sound of Fear: the Musical Universe of Horror event at the Southbank Centre in London on 3rd September 2011, which is part of the Sound and Vision festival of music for visuals from films to games to advertising. More information here and here.

For now, a taster. Do bear in mind that the questions and reaction shots of yours truly were filmed after Carpenter had left the premises. Standard practice in TV, but a ruddy peculiar thing to have to do, let me tell you, re-enacting what you just did, but this time into the void of silence. It gave me a new respect for the slickness of your professional TV interviewers.

Monday, August 08, 2011

And so I enter the reissue business myself...

Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock is available once again 21 years after its original publication. It's one of the debut batch of reissues launching Backpages Classics, which is the e-book imprint of Rock's Back Pages.

Blissed Out returns in substantially expanded form with five bonus essays that track the development of underground music and artists such as Morrissey and My Bloody Valentine in the years following the book’s 1990 release. There's also an in-depth Afterword contextualising the rants 'n' raves therein as the byproduct of a unique historical phenomenon: the “space of possibility” known as the UK weekly music press.